Bruce kicks off the chapter by describing the fortifications he's been busting his ass to build and HOO BOY!
Six hundred and seventeen of em are built south of the Ganges and east of the San, around the Raajmahal hills: Four foot wide trenches, lined with polymer bags at their base and at their front and back, with firing slits built into the bags (they're reinforced by steel and pressed wood structures) that allows a rifleman to stand in them and shoot at a wide number of angles. Of course, the trenches zig-zag and connect to unlined slit-trenches that run back of the line for communications and ammunition. There are bombardment bunkers if the enemies bring in heavy artillery, and communication is going to be used both voice and mirrors and flashing Morse codes. There are mortar pits three hundred yards behind these lines and miles back, there are the heavy artillery (who are going to be spotted by coordinates beamed down from the Blinking Stars network.) They burn away all vegetation in a few miles of the trenches, turning a once beautiful wilderness area into a gray and black wasteland with plenty of open views, and they lay out stakes to mark ranges.
Half a mile out, you hit them with mortars with anti-personnel shells.
At a mile, the snipers open up (one per ten man squad) - with bolt action .223 (inch, not millimeter) caliber rifles with telescopic sights, firing extra long rounds with a 300 grain bullet that spins every eight inches in the barrel before it comes out (so they're very stabilized.) They're armor piercing and can punch through body armor at this distance.
(As a note, most of the enemy are wearing, like...cloth uniforms.)
At four hundred yards, the .50 Minot rifles open up: They're also bolt action because they're firing fat headed explosive bullets. Fifty caliber explosive bullets. There are two of them per squad, carried by their designated marksmen.
At three hundred yards, the .30 caliber automatic rifles, the Springers, open fire. There are four per ten man squad.
At the hundred yard mark, the one guy with canister tubes pop out and open fire with the canister - which shoot a spread of carbon filament pellets across the open ground AND they trigger the f*cking claymore mines.
Counting that up, that's eight men.
Yeah, cause at the same time, each squad's heavy gunner and assistant gunner is going to be sweeping the whole area with their .50 caliber machine guns. Also, there's barbed wire. Also, the Yukon are all wearing body armor, helmets and have deployable little polymer sheeting things that they can swing up to bounce grenades thrown at them out of the trench.
Now, I'm not an expert but I do play a lot of Supreme Commander and love playing as the vampire pirates in Total War: Warhammer 3 (who tend to have a very stationary, defensive combat style built around having a f*ckton of overlapping fields of gunfire) but that sounds excessive.
Bruce goes on to explain that most wars against the Yukon were fought in a very different way: Thanks to their overwhelming advantage in artillery and airpower, their enemies would split into lots of tiny units that would then try and overwhelm what the Yukon could not defend, skitting close and launching handheld incendiaries at Yukon forces. The Chinese, using similar tactics but backed by their almost on part technological and massive numbers advantage, actually did manage to win several battles in the Pacific War before Yukon naval and areal victories forced an armistice. But they know they can't fight like that this time.
Bruce notes that the Chinese are in an impossible position: Don't attack and the airbases have impunity to attack their homelands. Attack, and run their troops into this Hell. He has no idea how right he is on the 'impossible position' thing, though...
While doing the final checks after months of construction, Bruce notices something: A flaw in the defenses. There's a hill at an axis point between the Ganges and the San (which serve as the natural borders of the formation, and are guarded by gunboats with MGs and artillery) that, if taken, might allow the Chinese a place to hole up, prepare, then launch attacks at other fortifications. He offers to level it to General Hood.
Bruce's Narration said:
"I knew you would spot it right off. Put a star besides Colonel Bruce's name," he joked to his secretary.
"Do you want me to correct it, sir?" I asked him. "We could level the hill, or move the other fortifications up making the line-"
He cut me off.
"This is where the Chinese will make the battle," he said. "There, I will give them a proper cappuccino."
"If they don't give you on," I said. "The rumor mill has it there are close to five million Chinese mustering north of the borderline."
"Never believe rumors, Robert," said Hood. "The Blinking Stars tell us that there are approximately five million Revolutionary Guardsmen about Wei. Their total army numbers closer to twenty million."
I was thankful there were no mirrors in the Marshal's tent for I probably turned white when he told me the size of the force that Peking's tyrant had sent to the Himalayas. Hood did not seem to care whether the Chinese Army was large or not. He directed my attention to his twenty four month calendar for 2420 and 2421 he had hanging from his central tent pole.
"They have more men in Tibet than they can feed," he says. "Their logistic capabilities are stretched to the limit and beyond. Every truck in their empire is carrying food to the front, and still a thousand men a week are dying up there from disease, cold, hunger, thirst. When the bombing starts, they will lose a quarter million dead and wounded on cloudy day and two million or more when we have clear sky. They have forty days, minimum. Forty days to march down the Brahmaputra and the Ganges, cross the San, and defeat us utterly at the hill..."
Now, if you are saying, "That's...insane", Bruce actually thinks so too. It's such a titanic force, and so clearly unworkable (think of that logistic effort.) However, it's also basically the only thing the Chinese *can* do. Their best airplane, the steam jet (which will be described later), is incredibly fast and quite advanced. It's also short ranged! More like a defensive weapon, ya know, like...a normal country would build, not like the Yukon's world-eating planes. But you can see a way for them to win the war: If they knock out India, then most of the airbases that threaten them are gone, and they might capture some thousand plus Yukon and maybe get a hostage negotiation treaty going on.
And...well, lets say that they may have reason to know that they won't be able to feed most of these soldiers anyway, no matter where they are...
Hood is unperturbed. "Our fathers chastened them with whips. We shall chasten them with scorpions," he says, a paraphrase of First Kings 12:14 and a very metal line from the Bible.
Oh, and one thing: "Make them a Proper Cappuccino" is a Yukon saying that refers to a time before the Storm Times where a Yellowjacket (remember them? The multiethnic "gang" that controlled large swaths of America before the apocalypse) couple arrived at a cafe, ordered a cappuccino, and so the Yukon owner dragged them out back and beat them to death. Like...that's just a hate crime, dude?
How appropriate.
As the building and training continues, we get news of the Conference of the Americas: A diplomatic meeting where Valette (ugh) meets with ambassadors from Mexico, the Caribbean Confederacy, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, the United States of Central America, Guyana, Greater Colombia and Argentina to discuss Fitzpatrick's Four Points. Valette lays them out.
- The nations will destroy their military and commercial airplanes.
- The nations will scuttle their warships and the Yukon navy will have rights to enter all points on the ocean.
- The Yukon merchants will trade without restrictions or tariff and any Yukon on foreign soil was to be protected from the natives by every method possible.
- Each nation will pay yearly tribute equal to ten percent of their GDP.
Bruce says that the general reaction around the base is that Fitz...must have been playing some kind of vast practical joke in incredibly poor taste. There was no way that anyone, EVER, would sign it - not even countries that he says the Yukon have bullied for centuries. They all are sure Fitz would back down from these points in a few days. Instead, every country save Colombia and Argentina sign it. So, on October 25th, 2420, the Yukon declare war.
Bruce's Narration said:
Everything we learned in the papers in regard to the bombing raids came from the War Ministry in Cumberland. We read that the Argentine and Columbian forces were destroyed on the ground, and we saw the names of some twenty-some Yukon pilots and navigators killed in action. From our remote perspective, this seemed a peculiar, nearly bloodless war. Armies were not on the march; our forces had the skies and the seas to themselves; our advantages were so overwhelming that there seemed no one else in the war other than Yukons. The photographs we saw showed sleek ships sailing in formation and young seamen resting on sunny decks. One reporter I read took to writing items on the species of fish he had sighted off his ship's bow, as there was nothing else happening that interested him.
Reading this, Bruce confides to his batmen, Charlie and French, that he still thinks the Consul will have to back down. "Strategic bombing doesn't win wars!" he says, firmly and forcefully and directly through time to the United States Pentagon in the year 2005. French, though, scoffs.
"Napoleon might not have won with bombers, but Fitzpatrick is smarter than him."
Well. Maybe not smarter, but to Bruce's shock, French is right: First Columbia, then Argentina both surrender on November 24th and the 28th, a mere 35/39 days after hostilities had started. There's a scene where the Sixth holds a big parade and plays all sorts of patriotic songs...while Bruce, Hood, Stein and Daddy Montrose all sit in a command tent, and Daddy goes: "The only thing I can think of them using are some kind of incendiary that's so horrifying it forced the [Slurs] to give up." Hood nods and says that God is probably not too happy with the Yukon at all.
Stein, who is drunk, says this.
...I'm not including the slurs.
Bruce's Narration said:
"Will you weep for the [Chinese] you're going to kill as you do over this handful of dead [Latin Americans], old chap?" Stein called after Daddy as the corps commander passed through the tent flaps. "Buckets of blood now, rivers full of them, comilitome!"
"Must you, PEter?" asked Hood.
"I prefer Lord Colonel Stein," said Stein. "Yes. I must..."
You know? at least Stein's f*cking honest. And we all know...it wasn't incendiaries. Was it?
The twenty million standing army in China has a horrible logic to it now - if you can imagine the swarms of locusts eating their way through Chinese croplands, reports coming in of an unstoppable, seemingly endless wave of insectoid death, the falling food projections, the horrifying math. The Yukon clearly have some method of stopping the swarms (since they must have offered them to the South Americans in exchange for signing the Four Points), but they're not giving it to the Chinese, not without unconditional surrender that would put the Chinese in an even less tenable position than they already have.
So, if they're going to die starving anyway, why not make a desperate bid for victory? And, like, this victory isn't just to aggrandize an Empire, it's literally for freedom from the Yukon boot. They are most emphatically the good guys.
Which is why this book gets to have its cake - the military wank describing all the fortifications and guns and fancy toys pitting our highly trained, elite soldiers against the ORIENTAL HORDES!!!!!! - and then also, eat it: The "Oriental Hordes" are masses of innocent men and women who did not start this war, did not want this war, and are quite literally put between starvation at home or starvation abroad, whose only hope is to overcome impossible odds to bring down a corrupt, evil empire.
With that grim thought, we also learn that Watchcharm Davis, aka, the male Rainbow Dash, has arrived.
"Oh I should say hi," Bruce says.
Hood takes his shoulders, looks into his eyes, and says; "Bruce. I forbid you to get on a plane with that maniac, flat out, you cannot do it, I order you, okay, do not get on that plane."
Bruce is like, "Okay, I wasn't...planning on it???"
Bruce's Narration said:
"Hood ordered me not to. He seems to think you might kill me."
"I wouldn't kill you. Not on purpose, anyhow. That is, in an airplane, when one dies, everybody dies, don't they?"
"Your navigators must love you."
"Can't seem to keep a permeant one," he confessed. "This last man I had in the back seat transferred to the infantry. Said he'd rather be in the damned trenches than fly together five minuets with me. You're an engineering johnny, Bobby; you understand the geomathics of the rangefinder-"
"The word is geometry, Watchcharm," I said. "We took the class together."
"I remember! I sat behind you, old man. You underood it, and I had a pilot's eyesight to rely on when the test time came. So, any old how, you want to come up with me today?"
"Hood forbate it."
"Judge Jerry will never know."
"I gave him my word," I said.
"Well, if you're afraid then..."
I realized that Watchcharm Davis may not have passed a math exam on his own, nor had he mused upon his life long enough to have even known a moment of self-doubt. I also realized he knew how to provoke a Yukon man. Among us, slander against one's family is endurable when the slanderer smiles, denying God is acceptable in an academic setting, and after a few drinks one can make a disparaging remark about another man's wife. Never, never, never, not until the sun explodes, will we let another doubt our courage...
So, Bruce is on the plane. We also learn that Davis has a wife who is basically the female version of Rainbow Dash, and he brags about how, while several months pregnant, she speared a boar from horseback. They're eager to have a child, who they are going to raise just like themselves. Bruce also learns that the pilots have little contests, you know, little fun games they play.
Contests like...
- Flying with low fuel on purpose
- gliding for as long as possible without power
- flying under bridges
- flying the highest, above the oxygen layer so the boiler threatens to go out
- flying as low as possible
- flying as fast as possible
kissing fish girls
Bruce is beginning to regret his decision. But his patriarchal programming remains strong enough that he's like "Sounds.......fun."
Bruce's Narration said:
We turned in a wide, slow circle over the long bridge at Bhagalpur to put ourselves on the span's east side. Davis suddenly flipped the plane upside down and made it fall wing over wing like a leaf fluttering down from a dying tree. My stomach bounched off my diaphragm and onto my intestines each time he made the plane roll.
"The F-101 is fast," narrated Davis, who remained outwardly calm while gradually rousing himself from somewhere deep inside. "She's not the most manueverable heap of bolts there is. Hard to handle. You ready to shoot the bridge?"
"W-What does that entail?" i stammered.
"An easy run under a wide section," he said.
He leveled off a few feet above the river and sped straight for the suspension bridge. I had time to think of my wife and close my eyes. Oh, Charlotte, i thought. I am so sorry I am dying like an idiot! In the darkenss I heard a scream sound infront of me. WE were past the bridge and flying straight upwards when I realized the scream had come from my excited pilot.
"Nice and wide under there!" shouted Davis. "The second span from the north bank is around six feet wider than my wings. You have to hit your nose right on the black mark Charlie Smithers painted or you'll take a wing off and its into the drink with you. Not that you would know. Hit the water at six hundred MPHand you might as well crash into steel."
"Charlie Smithers?" i asked. Davis Looped back around and made a second run, this time at the aforementioned narrow second span...
Thank you, Lord, thank you! I thought. Life is good! I love my wife! I love life and living!
"Whoa that was close!" shouted Watchcharm.
"You and Charlie Smithers," I said.
"Smithers?" said Davis. "Charlie only painted the mark. He didn't live long enough to shoot the bridge. We in the 55th squadron had to bury what was left of him outside the camp. You know, I think that mark of his is off to the right..."
Surviving his brush with Rainbow Dash, Bruce tries to find something, ANYTHING, to keep himself busy and away from Davis. As he does so, the Four Points continue to march across the world and the Sixth Army continues to prepare - the Chinese are still massing, and the Sixth is getting more and more and more ammo prepped. Valette arrives in Lagos and tries to press the Four Points on Sub-Saharan Africa and the "Disorganized African States" (as the Yukon refer to them) are like, "we can't sign these without permission?"
See, at the time, Africa was controlled by a hodgepodge of colonial powers - Yukons back every Christians, Turks back every Muslim, and the Chinese back every communist (Bruce refers to them merely as "atheists") and decades of constant warfare has obliterated social structures in the area. Bruce says this is because everyone wants access to Africa's resources.
Professor Von Buren leaps on this to go, "Bruce is OBVIOUSLY showing his treason, Yukon interference cannot be blamed for Africa's sorry state. Authorities on the matter agree that the genetic inferiority of the continent's inhabitants are why Africa lacked (and still lacks) political coherence."
...is anyone even shocked at this point? Is there a "tired Oof" meme?
A third Four Points conference is held on January of 2421 with the Slavs, Turks, and other undefined European and Asian powers attending. The CHinese don't show up, the Turks tell them to f*ck off, and the third and final conference wraps with Valette swinging by India on his way back, dragging with him his entourage which are a bunch of intensely spoiled rich fops and dandies with Valette deliberately trying to tweak the opinions of all the straight laced gruff and grumbly generals by telling ribald stories in koine - despite knowing that A) ladies are present and B) all the generals speak Greek, so they KNOW that he's flaunting social mores.
One lady does speak Greek and she does laugh and Bruce writes that this lady is none other than Lady Chelsea Virtue DeShay, the future Chrysanthemum Woman - then a "slender eighteen year old" who hadn't yet married the future Consul, Lord Newsom. Professor Von Buren takes up some slack for us with a footnote I will quote in full.
Footnote 24 said:
Lady Newsom, the Chrysanthemum Woman, or "The Empress" as many of her enemies would call her, made her debut upon the public stage as an "aide" to Lord Valette. The evil young creature, the future dominant power in the Shay regime, had been a student in Lady Fitzpatrick's school for young ladies, and, as the whole Confederacy would soon learn to regret, Lady Fitzpatrick had seen to it that her young charge was put on the Foreign Minister's staff, probably as a favor to the DeShay family, who were by then bound to the Fitzpatrick's by marriage.
So, the Shay Regime, the DESTIBLE SHAY REGIME, that we've been hinted at for the entire book, despite Professor Von Buren trying CONSTANTLY to draw a line between them and the good, noble Fitzpatrick rules, are literally wedded to one and the other, they're interconnected so closely that it makes it absolutely absurd to imagine that one and the other are any f*cking different. The Shays are just the sacrificial goat to the Fitzpatrick reputation.
We also learn during this dinner party that Fitzpatrick has quietly put out Consular Edict 23: Lords with "delicate constitution" are freed from their military vows and now, the military is mostly commoners, while the nobles get to go home and have fancy parties. Bruce believes this is to reaffirm noble loyalty to Fitzpatrick (he must be nervous about their private armies) but Von Bruen says it has to have been an "ill advised" decision put forward by the Shays.
You can't blame EVERYTHING on the Shays, Ro!
Stein is almost madder than the generals: He confronts Valette and Lady Chelsea (yes, Valette is being a creeper to an 18 year old girl - like, 18 years old is an adult-ish in our society, but Valette is both married and, like, ten years older than her, he's still being a creeper!) about how he's been wiling away his life with soldiers while all his fellow lords have been getting rich and screwing all the pretty girls. Valette is like, "Pshaw, you'll be back in high society any time now, stop whining, just do what Fitz asks you to do."
Stein is not exactly mollified, but Valette smarms past him to Bruce.
He has...issues with Charlotte. He talks around the issue in a smarmy way until Bruce puts his foot down.
Bruce's Narration said:
"YWhat you mean to say," I said, enraged to hear the fop speak of CHarlotte so carelessly. "Is how you are to know whether she is aware that Fitz was on familiar terms with the Goyer brothers?"
He took his arm off me and took a long stride away from my side. Valette was the most cunning of men, save for our friend hte COnsul. Like Fitz, he never made a gesture he had not reheresed in his mind an hour earlier. A second earlier he had been my concerned friend in every cell of his pampered body; after I had said the magic name "Gyor" he assumed the role of an offended political insider.
"Why not say that louder so we can both be impaled?" he asked.
(Reminder: The Gyors assassinated the Consul, and were known regulars of the tavern that Fitz went to hmm hmm.)
Valette asks if divorce is a possibility. Bruce is like, "I love my wife, sir."
Valette sighs, then goes, "Well...never the less." He turns to go, but drops two bombshells.
One: O'Brian actually HAS been stealing sh*t and trying to frame Stein for it, and Fitz has the goods on him. Valette is, as you might expect, gleefully excited about this, and lets that maliciousness slip for a second behind his mask.
Two: Mason actually got married. His wife is even in the entourage and he points her out. Bruce asks why Mason isn't here and he's like, "Come on, they're married, not married. Mason is a time zone and four felonies ahead of us."
And with that, they leave on a Zeppelin.
Bruce watches them go.
Then he immediately sprints to a writing desk and dashes out a letter to Charlotte telling her to take herself to the most secure spot in the wilderness, and to ask for Lord Prim-Jones (their liege) to protect him. She is to instruct the men of the family that if a fellow named Zimmerman or any other suspicious types show up, they're to kill them, bury them, and then pretend they never heard of them. Then he writes and sends off another letter, much shorter.
"Dear Buck: I think Fitz wants to kill my wife. Please help."
He sends both letters on a plane that will arrive days before the slow but more comfy zeppelin.
There's a few days of nerve wracking waiting while another Four Points conference begins in London which is argumentative and accomplishes nothing. Buck writes back with a long letter that fills in Bruce on some interesting facts: The Chinese ambassador is suddenly VERY INTERESTED in talking to Fitz and Fitz refuses to hear him, flat out. Lady Joan comes out every few days to sit with Buck in the sun with one of her handmaids, and together, they're all reading Emma aloud to one another. He says Lady Joan has the most beautiful voice in the world. 
BUt at the end of the letter, tucked in there, is a single sentence.
"Do not worry about that other thing. If F. does anything, I will prevent it."
FOOTNOTE TIME
FOOTNOTE 5: Bruce actually has daily logs from his officers books (every officer and NCO has to keep on) and Von Buren grumbles about how these are in total accordance with his books - proof that Bruce only lies about political matters.
FOOTNOTE 13: The other casualties in the Latin portion of the Four Points war are from two sailors who die in a boiler explosion and four who are killed when a powder bag explodes premature in a turret.
FOOTNOTE 16: The traditional Yukon battlecry is "Enjoy Hell!" Also, tragically, we learn that the future son of Rainbow Dash, Lord John Issacs Davis, was the only child of the two and...not entirely unpredictably, died in a glider crash at age 15. RIP.
FOOTNOTE 21: The official history is cited here for more details on how the Turks and Chinese alliance worked, but the thing I just noticed is that the pages are "2063-78" which is like, holy sh*t, that's a really long book? I think that's part of the joke, lol.
FOOTNOTE 26: It is at this point that nobles start wearing a little bit of Purple to indicate that they have sworn fealty to Fitzpatrick. "In imitation of Romans" Von Buren writes, YEAH NO sh*t BUDDY
FOOTNOTE 28: Mason's wife, Tabby, is the older sister of Lady Chelsea and lived at court until she fell out of favor and was strangled to death in her bed during the Shay Regime's many, many, many purges.
FOOTNOTE 30: London is mostly known for their cheese now, lol.
COMING UP NEXT: So much steampunk, you will choke on it...
